Lindy West, rejecting Twitter et al: "I want a site with a fucking backbone. I want a site that has an ideology, that is explicitly feminist and anti-racist, that is proactively progressive and cares more about users than their abusers."

"But when it comes to Gamerg8, finding any single kind of point to lock onto in terms of the viewpoint is impossible. Really. It's like trying to tango on quicksand. Every time you go behind the claim you hit another lie, another thing someone will say you don't understand. And unlike any organized group, there is no central ethos to reference at the core. Which just means all organizational statements or inclinations can be disavowed. The vast majority of the movement is actively harassing women? "Nope! They're just the minority and not part of what we're really about." for anything that can be used to reveal Gamerg8 for what it is and what it is doing is not part of the true movement. Those harassers? They are just minority trolls. Never mind that hulk can tell you from the hundreds of responses that's not the case. Point out that the movement is only frequently targeting women? "nope! It's about ethics and that's incidental." in this environment, all disagreements become personal attacks. It all becomes a moving goal post. The "truth" of virtually every single step is a shadow of something that cannot even be conceived, maybe even by the perpetrators themselves. Because the one thing Hulk cannot get any single one of them to do is outline something positive they are accomplishing that doesn't make it seem like they are trying to eradicate feminist influence in gaming. Instead, they just cling so desperately to the those positive words they say they represent and lash out against any and all threats. The end result is you can't even get to the nugget of disagreement on the world view. There is no world view. There is only the attack and the response.

Which, in case you are unaware, is the standard operating procedure for cults, behavioral programming and more organized organizations like $cientology.

Now... If all this trouble were just relegated to the Tower of Babel version of the internet, then this would normally be no problem. The potency of outsider opinions are most often helped by the fact that they disorganized, distant and separate. But the problem with the potency of Gamerg8 is that all those who fervently argue that this is not about sexism are then somehow able to bind their efforts into a fist to attack female developers / female writers instantly, along with the companies that support them on any level... And Hulk's pretty sure that many of them don't even realize that's exactly what they're taking part of.

You have to understand how problematic this is. It's almost thought to be impossible. What has essentially happened is that we have taken a cult behavioral approach to discussion and philosophy - normally a really difficult thing to instill into people and requires isolation, direct programming and full-on cultural separation - and turned it into something that has been casually learned on the internet's proverbial streets through the organic process of being a part of video game's most toxic subculture.